Windows Hosts

Special Note About Building from Windows Hosts

When building boxes from a Windows host system, you must ensure that kickstart configuration files (ks.cfg for RHEL based systems) and preseed files (preseed.cfg for Debian based systems) have Unix line endings (i.e. lines end with LF character only). Moreover, it's also a good idea to have *.sh scripts with Unix line endings too.

When these files have Windows line endings, the group creation can fail in the pre-seed phase and in turn, prevents the user vagrant to be created correctly. This ultimately results in Packer not being able to connect to the newly booted up machine with an error message that looks like this:

==> virtualbox-iso: Waiting for SSH to become available...
==> virtualbox-iso: Error waiting for SSH: handshake failed: ssh: unable to authenticate, attempted methods [none password], no support

Since Packer tries to log in with user vagrant but it was not created successfully in the pre-seed phase, it is unable to connect to the machine and the packaging process stops.

By default, when cloning this repository, git should normalize ks.cfg, preseed.cfg and *.sh to Unix line endings and *.bat to Windows line endings, thanks to the <.gitattributes> file in the repository. However, if it's not the case because you have overridden line-ending conversion in your own git configuration, convert the offending files so they have the correct line endings.